On my HP Pavilion, even with Vista and the graphics tweaks at 1920x1200 this runs very nicely so far! For fun I tried to run the beta on an older Dell Windows XP machine so we could play inhouse lan. The graphics are great, but even in default mode the mouse barely moves at all. I'm not sure I can reduce the games performance enough to be smooth, and then what's the point. So, do we just use the regular SG release on older machines, or is there a fix or a memory hog that we can reduce?

Before trying to tune your setup, can you try to prepare a demo you'll start on 1.0 and then on 1.1b1 ? Then tell us your average FPS at each time ? Try to copy your q3config.cfg to have exactly the same stuff. With 1.1b1, you may want to use "+set fs_homepath" command line argument to share easily the configuration, see: q3config moved in 1.1

I don't have access to the older Dell right now, but we do want to figure it out! I've already doinked with graphics settings, which did speed it up slightly. So I think I may reinstall with the default.cfg and start over. Older computer and graphics card, but new 1920 x 1080 native Samsung. Graphics settings probably?

Just deleting both q3config.cfg files will reset everything to defaults. You can find the other one by typing %appdata% into the Run dialog box or the Windows Explorer address line, then look for the Smokin' Guns folder in that folder.

Mystery solved! I downloaded the available Catalist drivers for the Radeon 9200 card in the older XP computer. 1.1 runs great. It takes a while to load because of the older processor, but once it's running I didn't notice any serious lag in fps. No problem sending bots to Boot Hill anyway. I even bumped up the anisotropy, etc. and it looks pretty good! Well done, all!

Slightly OT but I just posted VC8 binaries for Windows 98 users. YMMV but the game launches. Find it here.

Reasoning: The game will work hardware wise back to the NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 and possibly even ATI Rage 128 Pro (Both 1999 era) and a lot of the time you can come across 1GHz era laptops from scrap yards and recycling centers with roughly (as crappy) similar specifications as would had at the time been preferred for 98. MSFN has guides and links to patch packs for those coming across such archaic hardware.

The backport was as simple as changing the file format version in a few build files and they are committed to svn as msvc8 in misc/msvc. I discovered this by looking at Microsoft's product lifecycle for their sdks.